I am now an adult... but it still strikes me at odd times. Like last night, when I realized that what I was most looking forward to was finishing the dishes and having a cup of tea in the backyard. Not that household cleanliness and hot drinks are bad, necessarily. But having that be the great joy of my evening--instead of, say, staying up till 1 around a campfire, or being kept awake by the torments of loooooove, or writing bad poetry about either of these two other things--felt suddenly very Grown Up. I immediately felt the need to go get a tattoo AND shave my head.

Except, you know, my job. And stuff.

A few weeks ago I had a long discussion with a friend about the difference between being a grownup and being an adult. Grownups have dead souls, was the implication. Grownups are done growing, and done changing. Grownups in the Little Prince grande personne sense. Which doesn't feel like what I am, but maybe I'm deluding myself? I do feel more stable, less volatile, more certain of myself and of the world. I am calmer and more likely to take pleasures from the contrast between hot tea and cool evening air than from uprooting my life on a whim. Maybe that looks like soul-death from the outside.

And then Jenny Holzer, as part of her work Truisms posted this message on Twitter the other day:



While I've accepted most of her other truisms as, well, true, this one stuck in my gullet. Which I says more about me remaining partially adolescent than it does about the truthfulness of the statement.

I want to end with a conclusion that starts, "But then I..." Unfortunately, there is no conclusion. My self is in tension with myself. Is becoming an adult like selling out? Did all of the adults I knew as a young person--people who seemed so together and responsible and boring--all feel like this? Yes, and yes. Looking forward to more of this.

Smoke and ashes

I love watching Mad Men, but it makes me want to smoke and drink like crazy. Everyone smokes. Everyone drinks. All the time. I remember ashtrays in movie theaters and hospital waiting rooms, but it seems like a dream of the Dark Ages. Was life really like this? It doesn't seem possible.

My grandmother used to tell the story of how her doctor thought she was gaining too much weight during her pregnancy, and encouraged her to start smoking to help her not eat so much.

I think that was an entirely different world, an alternate history. How could we have been there and ended up here?




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The Daily Death: When A Celebrity Dies Every 15 Minutes

The Daily Death: When A Celebrity Dies Every 15 Minutes: "

In the future, a famous person will die every fifteen minutes. Already it’s happening. The ascent of the microcelebrities, the 24 hour news cycle, citizen journalism, and our darkest fantasies all collide on Twitter now. The website’s rhetorical question “What are you doing?” sometimes feels more like “Who died today?”

Every day on Twitter, news of another death. Les Paul, John Hughes, Farrah Fawcett, those big names, but also the editor at this publication, the founder of this startup, the people who we might not all know, but someone you know knew them and they are using the space to remember them.

Sure, Maria Shriver’s euology made me sit up straighter and think I want to be like that. But, I mean, was I supposed to be shocked that Eunice Kennedy passed on? I guess it’s small talk of a darker sort. You could talk about the weather or whose heart stopped.

Fall Plans

Mmmm.... Venison.... Hopefully coming to a freezer near you. I'll keep you posted as plans progress.

Bwahahaha!

Michael Heath can always be counted on for some rainy summer entertainment. I hope you enjoy this as much as I do. And keep on keeping on, my queer friends: I'm not such a fan of the hot weather anyway.

A ‘cloud of error’ hides the ‘light of reason’:

"Our crops are faring like our moods. The potato crop is blighted, and corn and fruit fields wither. In one historic building in Augusta, rain flooded the basement, as water from another source poured down through the ceiling and extinguished a century-old chandelier.

Few people would be bold enough to suggest the cause of the endless rain and gloom, that the moral climate in Maine has caused the sun to hide its face in shame.

Worse than the rain is the fact that Maine voted in homosexual “marriage.”

In May, our elected officials overturned a law of nature, and in its place paid honor to evil and unnatural practices. Our leaders allowed a cloud of error to hide the light of reason, and then the rain began. How fitting that this eclipse of human reason is mirrored by the disappearance of the sun!"

Agri-Intellectuals

It's nice to see a logical, well-written reply to the locavore/small farm/slow food movement. But I still think this writer is wrong

The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals — The American, A Magazine of Ideas:

"On the desk in front of me are a dozen books, all hugely critical of present-day farming. Farmers are often given a pass in these books, painted as either naïve tools of corporate greed, or economic nullities forced into their present circumstances by the unrelenting forces of the twin grindstones of corporate greed and unfeeling markets. To the farmer on the ground, though, a farmer blessed with free choice and hard won experience, the moral choices aren’t quite so easy. Biotech crops actually cut the use of chemicals, and increase food safety. Are people who refuse to use them my moral superiors? Herbicides cut the need for tillage, which decreases soil erosion by millions of tons. The biggest environmental harm I have done as a farmer is the topsoil (and nutrients) I used to send down the Missouri River to the Gulf of Mexico before we began to practice no-till farming, made possible only by the use of herbicides. The combination of herbicides and genetically modified seed has made my farm more sustainable, not less, and actually reduces the pollution I send down the river. "

Kind of wish I was there

OK, Go

Summer has now, finally, officially, begun in the jennyjeez household. Last night I went swimming at the Kiwanis Pool, ate a soggy italian sandwich, got an ice cream cone (well, a sorbet cone), and played my guitar.

Too bad it's already August. I'm going to have to work hard to fit a whole summer into this month.

Independence Day

What goes into fireworks (via chart porn)

Toot, toot

Internet heroez:

Click To Play

Public Privacy

I really like social media. Given the limitations on my social life that are inherent in single mom-hood (i.e. most evening-type hanging out has to be done at my house), sometimes online is the best way to get any friend-time in.

Is it sometimes shallow? Sure. But so are the non-online conversations I have with friends, too. I mean, IRL I like talking philosophy and literary theory and queer politics and everything, but I also like talking about how much I don't get the show Wipeout or what color socks I wear.

The bad thing about social media, as far as I can tell, is that everything is documented, and things that would be past and gone in a conversation are visible for potentially ever. And, unfortunately, people act as if their online interactions are private conversations--responding without thinking--when it's actually more like shouting in a really big room full of people.

Case in point: Alice Hoffman, a well-known writer, went kind of nuts on Twitter when she got a bad review. All of the things she's saying are perfectly reasonable things to think and feel and talk about with friends, but it's like she's forgotten that she's saying them in public. Or, if she hasn't, this way of addressing of the issues strikes me as kind of passive aggressive. Why not write an op ed? Or issue a statement through her publicist? Or write an open letter to the reviewer?

As it is, she comes off as petty and nasty and unprofessional, because what she's having trouble with is a *professional* relationship: she writes books and people read and review them. She might as well be angry with the mail carrier for bringing the mail.

Uncool

Proving that I am once again the least cool person ever (just ask my tween, she'll confirm for you), I am now going to complain about the weather.

Gripe, gripe, whine, moan (pause to scrape off mildew, repeat)...










Did I mention that this is my vacation week? It is. The good news is that I've finished a lot of house projects, but I was hoping to get at least a LITTLE Vitamin D on this vacation. Not a lot, just SOME. Instead I'm growing vestigial gills.

Haunted

I like to listen to podcasts when I'm doing unpleasant things, like the dishes, or working out. Some people like music for this purpose. I generally don't; music doesn't have enough words to distract my busy busy mind.

So this weekend I was catching up on some old This American Life episodes while cleaning up, and heard this story of haunting, explained here:

Some nights after I have been in bed for a while, I have felt as if the bed clothes were jerked off me, and I have also felt as if I had been struck on the shoulder. One night I woke up and saw sitting on the foot of my bed a man and a woman. The woman was young, dark and slight, and wore a large picture hat. The man was older, smooth shaven and a little bald. I was paralyzed and could not move, when suddenly I felt a tap on my shoulder and I was able to sit up, and the man and the woman faded away. Sometimes, after I have gone to bed, the noises from the storeroom are tremendous. It does not happen every night; perhaps a week or ten days will pass, and then again it may be several nights in succession. Sometimes it sounds as if furniture was being piled against the door, as if china was being moved about, and occasionally a long and fearful sigh or wail.

It turns out that they were being poisoned. They called a doctor:

He examined the house thoroughly from top to bottom and interviewed the servants. He found the furnace in a very bad condition, the combustion being imperfect, the fumes, instead of going up the chimney, were pouring gases of carbon monoxide into our rooms. He advised us not to let the children sleep in the house another night. If they did, he said we might find in the morning that some one of them would never wake again.

It makes me wonder about "ghostly" experiences of my own. Were they just bad air? Will anyone ever explain alien sightings this way, or just ghosts? How about unicorns? Are all the ramblings of the mind preventable?







images from http://www.ghoststoriesandpictures.com/

Can't resist

In light of my previous love for Brett Michaels, it would seem amiss for me not to share this brilliantness:



And to think I flashed that guy once. Sigh.

Phone envy

My new economic situation has led to more than weight gain; it has also opened the door to some serious technology envy. I think I might get an iphone.

Further weighing my decision is the fact that my current cell phone screen is cracked (apparently a high-speed collision with the post office floor can cause destruction--who knew?).

The point here is not my disgusting consumeristic drives, but the fact that I will then have two old cell phones bumping around in the back of the Everything Drawer in the kitchen. And today I visited a handy website that lists many many places where I can recycle them. You just put in your zip code and, voila... instant guilt removal.

Now about that iphone...

I could look at this all day

I'm totally fascinated by the unplanned pieces of people's lives--the parts that weren't structured for public viewing. When I walk past lighted windows at night I HAVE to look in. When I look at old pictures, it's what's in the background--what was on the kitchen counter that day, where the clock was hung on the wall, what books lie open on the table--that interests me.

As a result, I am enthralled with this photo project by Mark Menjivar documenting the insides of people's refrigerators.

And no, you can't see mine. It does kind of remind me of the fridge of the former WWI POW, though.

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Shameless Self-Promotion, part 3

After a long absence, I've written another Queerbie column. Some of it might look familiar to you...

Upcoming Events

I'm going to be participating in a panel discussion on June 18 about Intergenerational Queer/Trans Activism and how we'll continue to document and tell our stories. The lineup for the panel is like a short list of everyone I'd want to be trapped on a desert island with.

You should come check it out...

Audio Entertainment

A couple of cool radio things:

A presentation at the Winter 2008 Stonecoast Residency that I facilitated is online, thanks to Brita at the Maine Humanities Council. You can listen to it here.

The radio show that I mix sound for, Safe Space, is archived online. You can listen here.

I also guested on Money Talks last week (5/13), talking about "How to be Poor," and that will be archived here at some point.

Hankie

Take that, virus formerly known as swine flu.


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